A warning tonight if you have a Yahoo email address that you haven't used in a while.

Yahoo plans to recycle Yahoo user IDs that have been inactive for a year or more.

Yahoo has been very open about this practice giving everyone plenty of time to plan. They released a statement that said:

"We're committed and confident in our ability to do this in a way that's safe, secure and protects our users' data. It's important to note that the vast majority of these inactive Yahoo! IDs don't have a mailbox associated with them. Any personal data and private content associated with these accounts will be deleted and will not be accessible to the new account holder."

And added, "To ensure that these accounts are recycled safely and securely, we're doing several things. We will have a 30-day period between deactivation and before we recycle these IDs for new users. During this time, we'll send bounce back emails alerting senders that the deactivated account no longer exists. We will also unsubscribe these accounts from commercial emails such as newsletters and email alerts, among others. Upon deactivation, we will send notification for these potentially recycled accounts to merchants, e-commerce sites, financial institutions, social networks, email providers and other online properties."

WBTV Cyber Expert Theresa Payton says there are a few things to think about as this process happens:

Yahoo has done a great job communicating this but do not ignore this information if you ever set up a Yahoo account in the past.

For example, if you linked your Yahoo email ID to any sites as a recovery email and you request a password reset on a social media account, your bank account, another email address -- it will go to someone else. You might have done this so long ago that you might have forgotten it.

STEPS TO TAKE NOW:

1. Go to all of your important accounts - banking, social media, email, etc. and go to the security settings to see what email addresses you have set up there

2. Go to Yahoo and decide whether or not you want to keep that account - all it takes is to send / receive some emails and logging in to keep it active